I'm looking to learn more about what nuclear engineers do.
I've had a huge interest in Nuclear Energy since I was a little kid, and I'm wondering what the duties and responsibilities are for the positions, my educated guess would be that you manage the output of power for the site and your local power grid you're plant is attached to. but beyond that, I'm not able to guess, and while I could look it up, I've always preferred first-person accounts of what people do at their jobs, if you have additional information please let me know, thank you for reading my post.
2 answers
Joseph’s Answer
Your guess sounds like a nuclear engineer involved in power reactor operations - and yes, managing output power is certainly part of that job, as is managing the various subsystems to ensure they are all contributing to the generation of electricity and are balanced in the right way . There's a reactor operator who talks about some of these things while reviewing and reacting to other videos on YouTube - look up TFolseNuclear to get some insight into that side of nuclear engineering. There's also a few reactor simulator games you can find online that give you some idea about the workings of a power plant and the sort of parameters a reactor operator has to keep in balance (although be aware these games are huge simplifications, and they don't really match up properly to what an operator will be doing - a lot of the micromanagement you need to do in these games is actually automated in real life)
However, that's not the only type of role a nuclear engineer might work in - there's nuclear engineers working in maintenance and construction (nuclear new build) roles, nuclear engineers designing the next generation of advanced reactors, nuclear engineers working on fuel processing and manufacturing, and many more subfields. I'd recommend at least doing some searching to find what subfields are out there and what specific areas might interest you the most - you can then look up first-hand accounts from people working in those roles.
My own role probably sits closer to nuclear physics than nuclear engineering, although there's a huge overlap and many nuclear engineers also end up in my field - and that's radiation detection and measurement. There's plenty of variety in my role, balancing laboratory analysis with in-the-field measurements, and even research and development work, so my duties can include practical data collection, data analysis and report writing, quality assurance monitoring, reading research journals, attending conferences, training others - lots of different things.
Nathan’s Answer
Nathan recommends the following next steps: